Sources are the foundation of all historical scholarship. Musical sources are, at the same time, the foundation of historical musical performance. Information about musical sources, as RISM has been compiling and providing for 60 years, thus serves both: scholarship and musical performance.

Although the basic principles of documenting musical sources have stayed constant to a large extent, the technological means of keeping, exchanging, and linking data has changed. Efforts to build up the largest databases possible must be expanded to incorporate other preexisting databases. Furthermore, linking to resources such as authority files, Google Maps, online reference works, and digitized media is also in demand. Just the sheer number of digitized materials that are offered online has vastly increased in recent years. In many cases, this makes the use of sources considerably easier.

These developments are reason enough, ten years after the conference that marked the first 50 years of RISM, to bring together the newest approaches and look into further trends about the intersections of technology, scholarship, and practice.

Hyun Kyung Chae (Music Research Institute, Ewha Womans University - RISM South Korea): Establishing a Database of East Asian Music Educational Materials from the “Modern Era” [近代] as a Foundation for the Cultural Study of Music

Helmut Lauterwasser (RISM Germany): On Disappearing in One Big Pot: Distinct Collections of Church Music in Large Libraries, Small Church Archives in the RISM Database (Über das Verschwinden im großen Topf. Geschlossene Kirchenmusiksammlungen in großen Bibliotheken - Kleine Kirchenarchive in der RISM-Datenbank)

John G. Lazos (Canada/Mexico): A Portrait of the Composer José Antonio Gómez: Encountering Independent Mexico through New Technologies